As far as I can tell, adolescent exposure to porn has proved as meaningless as adolescent exposure to violent video games.
It dawned on me the other day that millennial men, being the first generation with access to seemingly unlimited amounts of porn from a young age, are not a bunch of sexually deranged rapists. In the same way we aren't a generation of murderers despite growing up on golden eye and counter strike.
You probably don't want your kids looking at porn, but I also think it's miles (kilometers?) from the point where we want a surveillance state in order to stop it.
> millennial men, being the first generation with access to seemingly unlimited amounts of porn from a young age, are not a bunch of sexually deranged rapist
It's caused the complete opposite, they aren't having sex at all.
True, but the causal link is hard to demonstrate. There's also a drop in friends, especially close friends. In-person social activity is down across the board.
Not that porn definitely isn't a factor, but I'm pretty certain there's larger factors at play.
If porn is involved in that equation, it's not the primary or fundamental driver.
I'd argue inflammatory foods that have a depressant effect on the nervous system, especially damaging during development stages, along with where mainstream culture is directing people - along with government policy heavily captured by industrial complexes and bad actors (domestic and foreign) in general, will be the leading causes.
If we simply look at the shallow metric of "not having sex" vs. studying to see what's different between those who are and aren't having sex, aren't having children - that's not going to be very fruitful except for people to simply conclude "be attractive; don't be ugly;" attraction is far deeper than the skin, however in part I believe that the inflammatory-depressant state I mentioned is likely to block to a small or large degree, a person's stimulation and excitement from deeper signals and processes that would otherwise 1) make more people attractive to them, as a stronger signal overall - which will be motivating on its own, and 2) also provide nuance to help with targeting to have the nuanced signals to know-learn more accurately who you're actually most attracted to - from more breadth and depth, where you could argue it allows a person's intuition to flourish; rather than be stunted by inflammation, or past unprocessed/unhealed trauma causing people to avoid, etc.
Sperm counts are going down for the better part of a century, and people are having less sex. Obviously coincendal and cannot related to each other in the least...
In jest I'd say it's caused not by porn but by Counter Strike.
Realistically I see much more issues with decay of Third Places (social meeting spaces) & decay of local society in general. But rather than have no culture & be bored, we have incredibly engaging interactive media to go engage in: CounterStrike or TikTok or whatever else.
I don't think these things are per se to blame. Cost of living being what it is, lots of people can't afford to go out to bars & clubs, one of the most traditional gathering spots for people. It's unclear what a lot of folks would change, what else they'd do, if the IT/media link they rely.
on so heavily were to shut off.
To be fair, the citations don't pass the sniff test. The very first citation contradicts statements in the article. Check the summary for it:
> Risky sexual behaviors were not associated with online pornography exposure in any of the groups, except that males who were exposed (deliberately or not) had higher odds of not having used a condom at last intercourse. Bi/homosexual orientation and Internet use parameters were not associated either. Additionally, males in the wanted exposure group were more likely to be sensation-seekers. On the other hand, exposed girls were more likely to be students, higher sensation-seekers, early maturers, and to have a highly educated father. We conclude that pornography exposure is not associated with risky sexual behaviors and that the willingness of exposure does not seem to have an impact on risky sexual behaviors among adolescents.
It was claimed: "However, early exposure to pornography and unregulated/excess exposure to pornography during the formative years of adolescence has been seen to have various long-term deleterious effects on sexual maturation, sexual behavior, Internet addiction, and overall personality development."
Notice that it said:
1. Early exposure
2. Unregulated
3. Long-term
4. May affect Behavior and/or internet addiction and/or overall personality development
Your citation meanwhile disproves one situation for specifically causing one of possible outcomes.
No it's actually worse imo. They used that citation to justify this statement:
> Studies have noted that early intentionally exposure to pornography use in children and adolescents can lead to delinquent behavior, high-risk sexual behavior, and substance use.
Except the citation says the literal opposite. Worse, the "link" to substance abuse sounds an awful lot like the articles suggestion that the male group that wanted porn were typically "sensation seekers", but that doesn't imply causation at all! I don't have access to the full paper to see if there's anything that remotely supports the article's claims, but this is a solid sniff test fail.
Because the citations fail the sniff test so badly and trivially, IMO the article, a clear call to action, has to be called into question.
It's bad enough that I wonder if the link to the article ought to be flagged on HN: if it were a submission, it would definitely be flagged and removed.
P.S.: In my opinion, the person calling out the lack of statistics is also completely correct. It's one thing to claim all of this stuff is true, but if it can't be quantified, how are we supposed to balance the actions we take against the severity of the problem? What if it's close to line noise?
I have a lot of skepticism because the rise of the Internet was a global phenomena. I'm not even sure Internet pornography is even at its peak anymore, but during the rise to prominence you'd be hard-pressed to find a correlation of any kind with an increase in, say, sexual assault, because that just continued to fall sharply with the rise of the Internet. If there is some effect, it's certainly not very obvious.
However, it did plenty of damage. Completely unrealistic dating expectations to the point where nobody dates anyone; women getting treated violently during sex ("what do you mean asphyxiation isn't normal?"), far greater experimentation with potentially dangerous behavior (anal sex), increased tension between the genders (hard to look at a man knowing he's looked at hundreds of you), etc. STD rates have also increased - syphilis has increased 80% in just 5 years. It is also a scientific fact that heavy porn use is correlated with depression, and depression rates among the youth have (to put it mildly) exploded, especially among young women (obviously other factors are contributing).
B. It's terrible for mental health and relationships.
C. Anything that is terrible for mental health, or relationships, is fair game for regulation on that basis alone when it affects children (alcohol, drugs, etc.)
Not really, we are just coming out of an unusually boring period in human sexual history. Ancient civilisations seemed to manage to be plenty deviant without any porn.
The sunset of Christianity's influence in the west has just as much to do with it.
> The sunset of Christianity's influence in the west has just as much to do with it.
What a common lark, and yet completely false.
Look at China - pornography is illegal. Guess what the firewall is also censoring. They are a completely atheist government by policy.
Look at India - pornography is illegal to distribute, and even though it is legal to privately consume, violent pornography is just as illegal as child pornography for private consumption. They are also not a Christian society.
Look at any Islamic country - be it Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, etc. You'll be lucky to save your head if you get caught publicly using it. (Of course, privately, there's a lot of users - but that's useful for blackmail.)
Look at Japan - pornography is legal, but all genitalia must be censored or blurred.
Look at most of Africa - pornography is illegal and heavily restricted, despite their Christian status being tentative at best.
Ironically, post-Christian countries are the only countries where this stuff is legal and unregulated as it is. Believe me as well, as Islam gets stronger in this country, you might be surprised where the strongest opposition starts coming from.
This argument is somewhat undermined by the inclusion of Japan, a country well known for just how debased its
porn is.
Laws are not a good proxy for culture. Culture is only one of the inputs into a country’s laws. Frequently the people who make the laws are not the same as the people who have to follow them.
As for Islam, Christianity and Islam are closely related, both being Abrahamic religions. I don’t think a distinction is meaningful in this context because both the Bible and the Quran include same story of Sodom and Gomorrah, so their sexual morality comes from exactly the same Abrahamic tradition.
It dawned on me the other day that millennial men, being the first generation with access to seemingly unlimited amounts of porn from a young age, are not a bunch of sexually deranged rapists. In the same way we aren't a generation of murderers despite growing up on golden eye and counter strike.
You probably don't want your kids looking at porn, but I also think it's miles (kilometers?) from the point where we want a surveillance state in order to stop it.